On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk finished his acquisition of Twitter.

After the purchase was announced in April of 2022 and accelerating after its completion, there was a migration of users from Twitter to smaller, and, the hopeful said, ‘cleaner’ platforms such as Mastodon (promoted as being safer because of its federated architecture) and Bluesky, funded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey with other investors and incorporated in October of 2021.

As the Musk era began, bringing with it increased abuse of staff, technical deterioration, an explosion of bot usage and an increased indulgence of fascist outbursts, I was one of the users who fled Twitter, later re-christened as X (fulfilling Musk’s longstanding dream of owning a company named X, which, as dreams go, is an ambition of sub-atomically small dimensions). I downloaded my data and quieted my account.

Off to Bluesky

In those early days, as former Twitter users rushed onto Bluesky (or perhaps I should say, dual users, since many people straddled both platforms), there was a spirit of self congratulation and celebration in the virtual air. Everyone was convinced we’d escaped a burning raft, drifting aimlessly towards a rocky waterfall. Civility uber alles.

Then came Al-Aqsa Flood and all that has followed. A live streamed genocide, a Rubicon crossed, ushering in a new age or perhaps, revealing that the colonial age never ended.

Twitter/X is Filthy, But So Is the World

In his essay on crime fiction, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, Raymond Chandler coined a phrase that haunts me: “it is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in…”

Awhile ago, I reactivated my account and now spend most of my social media time on Twitter. This isn’t to ‘debate’ or participate in ‘discourse’ (a dreadful word) but because Twitter remains the place where Palestinians and those who,through word and deed, support the effort against genocide are. If someone asks me, ‘why are you still on Twitter?’ my answer is clear: groups and people such as the Electronic Intifada, Jon Elmer, Justin Podeur, Laith Marouf and others are most active there. This is how I learn and sharpen my thinking. We have entered a new and, astoundingly, even darker phase of world history; a period in which ‘the west’ has dropped nearly all pretense and seeks to hold onto hegemony by climbing a mountain of skulls (the method originally used to achieve its faltering position).

If someone were to ask: why are you on Bluesky? My answer wouldn’t be so clear; to talk about the ‘AI’ fallacy, perhaps, to chat about the tech industry’s propaganda, maybe. These are, of course, still factors but in the midst of a world war, have receded to the background or, more precisely, I see these things in the larger context of that global war: the US-based tech industry as digital command and control apparatus for mass death (what Dan McQuillan, in his book, ‘Resisting AI’, calls necropolitics – a concept borrowed from the Black radical tradition which McQuillan applies to understanding the use of computer technology to determine who lives and who dies).

What is Bluesky for? I have no idea and really, it doesn’t matter. My mind has been forever rewired by witnessing genocide. There is no going back to the belief, or delusion, that there is someplace, outside of this ring of fire, where we can just relax and talk, as if the flames don’t exist.

It is not a fragrant world, but it is the one we live in. We have a duty to our ancestors, to ourselves and to the future to take in the stench and work, however we can, to bury the dead and build a better future.